Safe Sex at Christmas

A blog post by Freetest.me, posted on the 19th of December 2014.

How to Survive the Festive Season in One Piece

At the risk of repeating ourselves, this week’s post is going to be all about staying safe over the Christmas period. If you caught our freshers’ survival guide, you might already know some of this, but it doesn’t hurt to stick around and refresh your memory. September? Might as well be last year.

While our freshers’ guide was - as you’d expect - aimed at this year’s freshers, the advice in it could be applicable in a lot of situations people might find themselves in. As it’s the week before Christmas, we’re giving it a festive spin. But we’re not going to go all bah-humbug on you, because we couldn’t face being complete scrooges so close to Christmas.

Our first bit of advice applies if you feel like sharing the love this Christmas. Remember to wear a condom. When used properly, from start to finish, condoms are super effective at preventing pregnancy and STIs, ensuring you don’t receive - or give for that matter - any unwanted gifts. Think those novelty socks you got were bad? Think again. Finding out you’ve been given an STI is much worse.

The Christmas period is known as a time when you’re allowed to indulge, and you can eat and drink more than you usually would. However drinking too much can make any common sense you’ve got go out the window. Drinking more than you can handle can lead to poor judgement, and poor judgement can lead to you taking risks you normally wouldn’t.

This could mean running off with next door’s Christmas decorations, eating questionable Christmas dinner leftovers that have been in the fridge too long, or having unprotected sex. Know your limits and drink responsibly. Then if you do happen to meet someone, hopefully, you’ll remember to use protection. And next door’s flashing Santa will be safe for another year too.

However unprotected sex still happens, it would be silly to pretend it doesn’t. It would be even sillier to pretend that you’ve not put yourself at risk of a sexually transmitted infection by doing so either. So if you don’t manage to keep in mind the above two points, our last bit of advice is to take an STI test.

We’re not playing the role of the overbearing parent here either. We know that it happens. Last year 67 people ordered kits from us on Christmas day. It might not sound like that many, but that’s 67 people who were worrying about whether they’d caught an STI instead of enjoying Christmas day and quite possibly the most epic meal of the year. That’s not including tests ordered from other STI testing services on Christmas day either.

We know we’d much rather be worrying about whether our dad’s going to get to the pigs in blankets before we do than whether or not there could be an STI in our system. If you think you might have put yourself at risk, you can order one of our postal chlamydia tests and complete it at home.